Updating Prices in a Product Catalogue

[Ben_Sargeant@adobeforums.com]

Hi all

I'm currently producing product catalogues in pagemaker 6.5 which is linked to an ODBC data source so that we can produce catalogues with various retail prices for our customers. I would like to do this in Indesign from now on but i cant figure out the best way to do this.

Is there any way of updating prices in Indesign simply (a simple percentage up lift would be sufficient)

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Ben Sargeant

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

InDesign itself doesn't have the concept of a thing called a price, so no it can't by itself do what you want.

However, a script could do the job, and you could certainly flag things as being prices (either by context -- e.g., start with a $, or by explicit flagging using a character style) for the script to process.

Dave

[Ben_Sargeant@adobeforums.com]

thanks for that Dave

Do you have or know of any sample scripts that would achieve this.

thanks

Ben

[Ken_Grace@adobeforums.com]

You could use DataMerge in the PageMaker plug-in. You need to provide all
your variable text in a comma-delimited or tab-delimited text file.

k

[Dave_Saunders@adobeforums.com]

The script would likely need to be a custom script. It wouldn't be hard, but it would depend on the structure of your document.

I could probably bang out a script for you, but we should talk about that off line. Take a look at my web site: <http://pdsassoc.com> If you're interested in pursuing it further, e-mail me.

There are other commercial solutions available for this kind of thing and I even offer one on my website that might be appropriate depending on the form of your original data and how you'be brought it into InDesign. Take a look at my Products page.

Dave